Super-you: Discover the physics genius inside your brain

Without even realising, you perform fiendishly complex real-time calculations and predict the future like no other species can

It’s a balancing act

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By Richard Webb

THE washing-up pile wobbles precariously as you balance another saucepan at its summit. For a second, it looks like the whole stack will come down. But it doesn’t. Swiftly, instinctively, you save it.

Congratulations – not just on another domestic disaster averted, but also on showing a peculiarly human genius. Octopuses rival our dexterity, New Caledonian crows have a frighteningly clever way with tools and chimps beat us in tests of short-term memory. But no other species can perform complex, real-time calculations of their physical environment and generate specific, actionable predictions quite like the ones that rescued your crockery. “It’s kind of amazing,” says artificial intelligence researcher Peter Battaglia from Google DeepMind in London. “To me it defies my ability to understand.”